News Story

Brad Wardell and his team are taking Galactic Civilizations III to the next frontier - the 64-bit frontier - as the team want much bigger galaxies than previously possible. GalCiv II was "bumping up against" 32-bit limits.

He's not worried either as the "vast majority" of users are already using 64-bit hardware. With a grand strategy like Galactic Civilizations the whole galaxy is kept in memory.

It's definitely the direction everyone is going as Microsoft and Sony's next generation consoles only use 64-bit. All platforms are ditching the now inefficient ways of 32-bit.

"For us… 64-bit is just about memory, we wanted to have a much richer galaxy. Even GalCiv II, back in 2006, we were bumping up against that 2 GB limit. We had people who were like ‘oh, I really wish we could have even larger galaxies with more detail’ and we’d say ‘yeah, we’d love to that too, but we can’t do any more. We’re out of memory’."

"In a strategy game… I mean I’m playing Battlefield 4 at the moment, which I love, when it’s not crashing… but in that game you have 64 people, but you only see a small part of the map," Brad Wardell told us in our interview. "In a strategy game like GalCiv, we have to keep the whole Galaxy in memory. There’s no way around that."

"I think that by the time Galactic Civilization III ships, the majority of games in development will be 64-bit. I mean it’s… heck the consoles are all 64-bit, so just as a practical matter, anything that’s being made cross-platform is going to be 64-bit."

Galactic Civilizations III releases on PC with Founder's packages letting fans help fund the game from Stardock, and to secure alpha and beta access throughout development. Check out our full interview with Brad Wardell.